Painted Ladies

42

There was a big farmer porch on the front of the house that Ashton Prince had shared with Rosalind Wellington. There was a big tree in the front yard. If it had leaves, I might have known what kind it was. But in winter, with snow on all the limbs and no birds singing, I knew only that it was a tree and would probably have offered swell shade for the porch in summer.

It was a cold morning, and spitting snow. I ate in my car with the engine running and the heater on. The exhaust vapors would have alerted me or anyone like me to the presence of someone in the car. But Rosalind was not anyone like me, and was so self-absorbed that I thought it possible that she was never really alert to anything.

She came out her front door about nine-thirty wearing a striped multicolored knit cap pulled down over her ears and a bulky black quilted coat that reached her ankles. She paid neither my exhaust vapors nor me any heed at all, and strode off toward the college six blocks away.

When she was gone I took a small gym bag of tools and went to her front door. She hadn’t locked it with a key when she came out, so if it was locked, it would be a spring bolt and not a deadbolt. I took out a little flashlight and looked at the door latch. The door didn’t close snugly, and I could see the tongue of the spring bolt. Made duck soup look difficult. I took a small putty knife with a flexible blade from my gym bag and slid it into the opening. It took me less than a minute to lever the bolt back and open the door. I put my flashlight and putty knife back in the gym bag, zipped it up, and put it down just inside the front door. I took my jacket off and hung it on the inside doorknob. Spenser, King of the Burglars. B&E our specialty.

In the movies, when somebody searches a home, the place always looks like a model room in Bloomingdale’s furniture department. In the actual detective business, sometimes they don’t. Rosalind’s house was dusty. The living-room rug was threadbare, and the living-room furniture was inexpensive, and some of it sagged. There were dirty dishes in the sink. In the bedroom, the bed wasn’t made, and there were a lot of clothes on the floor.

I’d seen worse. I’d tossed a lot of homes.

I had already been there for a while when I came to what must have been Prince’s office. It had the feel of a place that had been closed up and silent for a while. The furniture needed help, and the room was dusty. But it was orderly. Prince’s desk was neat. To the right of his desk was a big painting of Lady with a Finch in a very ordinary-looking black frame. I walked over and looked at it. It had to be a copy, but even so, it was luminous. The tangibility of the lady and the bird was insistent. The felt surface of life, I thought.

On the desk, its top closed, was Prince’s laptop computer. I didn’t need to bother with it. Healy’s people would have gone through that and inventoried it after Prince’s death. I could get it from Healy. Besides, it was different from the one I had, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to make it go.

Prince’s calendar pad was open to the month he died, with entries for appointments he never kept scribbled in for dates well after his death. There was a sadness in the gap between the happy assumption that he’d be around to keep those appointments and the fact that he wasn’t.

I went through the calendar pad. I got nothing for my trouble. I understood what “pick up suit in a.m.” meant. But I didn’t care. There was a corkboard on the wall above Prince’s desk. There were various notes on it. Some were about scholarly stuff, names of articles, clippings from magazines I never heard of, and on the back of an envelope that had been torn in half was the name Herzberg. And a phone number. I put the note in my shirt pocket.

It took me another two hours to finish the house. Before I left I took one last slow walk through the place. Something kept poking at the edge of my awareness. I finished my final sweep of the house standing just inside the door of Prince’s office and slowly surveyed the room. One whole wall was books in a tired-looking bookcase. The window on the opposite wall looked out at the winter barren backyard. The Hermenszoon painting remained hanging on the wall, and then I realized what was bothering me. Except for the copy of Lady with a Finch, there were no paintings. In the home of a man who apparently had devoted his adult life to the study and appreciation of paintings, there was only one. The Hermenszoon copy was it.

It was hardly a eureka moment. But it was odd.